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Psychology in UX

If you’re like me, then being persuaded requires a scientific approach and concrete examples. And that’s exactly what this article does. It explains how gamification can work by showing the relationship between gamification, UX design, and BJ Fogg’s modern persuasion phenomenon, “mass interpersonal persuasion.” And it has a lot of practical gamification examples that you can apply to your own products for more engaging experiences.

Human Cognition

Design can benefit immensely from cognitive bias.
Specifically, design can benefit from thinking of cognitive biases as keys to efficiency and accuracy, rather than as roadblocks in the way. Dark patterns prey on the way we think to meet more nefarious ends — but what if, instead, we used the way we naturally think to design better interactions and experiences? Cognitive bias helps us to better understand our world and act accordingly — quickly. It’s important to understand exactly how this works, so that we can design for and with it rather than against or in spite of it. Cognitive bias should be a powerful tool in the designer’s belt.

Accessibility enables people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the web. Imagine a world where developers know everything there is to know about accessibility. You design it and they build it… perfectly. In this world, only the design itself can cause people with disabilities to have trouble using a product.
These guidelines will cover the major things you need to know in order for your products to be “design-ready” to meet the minimum of standards in Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The rest will be up to development and quality testing.

Human, AI and UX

Behind the scenes, AI helps make Facebook smarter and easier to use. We use it to help translate text so people can understand each other better, to recognize what’s in images so visually impaired people can “see” the photos their friends post, and to filter out undesirable content like spam. We also use AI to understand the intent behind what people post so we can improve their experience on Facebook. When I started as a designer at Facebook, I hadn’t thought much about AI or how it could be used as a tool in product design. But then I ended up designing Facebook Recommendations, which uses AI to detect when people are asking for local recommendations, and then to match the places that their friends recommend to Facebook Pages. It’s one way we help connect people and local businesses.

Melbourne was the final stop on this year’s Salesforce Basecamp tour, and the final keynote of the event was given by Shaun Paga from Soul Machines, a New Zealand company specialising in building what they call “Artificial Humans”. These are digital avatars with very detailed faces that respond to the emotional cues of the person they’re talking to.

Conversational UI

After a couple of years involved in UX chatbot design at BEEVA, after a bunch of prototypes, and after infinite hours testing other people chatbots I partnered Nieves Abalos and Carlos Muñoz and started a side project called chatbottest.com. Chatbottest is an open source Playbook of 120 questions (and counting) that you can use for free to test your chatbot and its UX. Similar to what you get with a Heuristic Evaluation on traditional interfaces, with this guide you will be able to find out what users will expect from their interaction.

Books and Resources 📖

During different design thinking sessions, participants frequently ask for my advice about what books to read to acquire more knowledge in the field. Sometimes they are even more specific and ask about books for specific parts of the design thinking process.
So here it is: my selection of books for each stages of the design thinking process. I hope you will like them as much I do. Have a good reading!